The World Wide Web has expanded to provide web services faster to consumers. Web services may be provided by a web application which uses one or more services to handle a transaction. The applications may be distributed over several machines, making the topology of the machines that provides the service more difficult to track and monitor.
Monitoring a web application helps to provide insight regarding bottle necks in communication, communication failures and other information regarding performance of the services that provide the web application. As more and more businesses rely on a network presence to conduct business, the efficiency and reliability of these web services that they provide becomes more important. Typically, performance for business web services has been measured based on the response time of a uniform resource locator. (URL). Though URL may be easy to determine resource usage with, it does not give a true indication of what portion of a web service may be performing well or not performing well at all.
What is needed is an improved method for determining performance of a web based service.